C'EST LA VIELOOMA CHILD WHITTLED BY TIMEBARE HOUSESDEBTBOOMTHE OTHER HALLLAWNA BOX OF AIROUT OF TIMETHE SMILE AND THE TUNNELTHE HILLAND WHAT IF DEATHTHE SHORTEST DAY BUT ONECARETAKINGHAYBLOODSATORIVESPERSBONE FLUTECHERRIESA MAP OF THE PARISH OF KILLANNY IN THE 17TH CENTURYEVENINGSTOCKTHE LOST CHILD

Like a spider shuttlingthe afternoon has shiftedbetween major and minor,a timid warmth,cold kept at bay,the friction of something frayed.

A pattern formson the loom of emptiness.

A CHILD WHITTLED BY TIME

You move, unmoving,from one mystery to anothera child whittled by timethin, straight, sharp-shouldered,your eyes narrowedas if they looked out on a siege.

What does the castle of your mindtell of thirty years,what fosterage within walls,the passing seasons weighed in a changing sky?

How light a worldyou hold in a closed hand,a smile that is everything and nothing,

you who were once a cloth, a screen.

BARE HOUSES

My boyhood town gave me its bare housesto dream against; their walls were screenswhere played films never to be seen.Its dry winds came from the street where Dylanwalked arm in arm with Suze Rotolo,and when we hunched against the coldwe turned our coats like spies.

And now I think of those old women then,their covered heads, lips moving soundlessly:into what bright expanse were they castas stain-glass darkened round its leaden veins,their black beads stirred as if by a breeze?

DEBT(i.m. J.S.)

You left just in time – am I allowed to say thatin this age that resents the implication of will?But you went anyhow, before summer had ended,and your exit was suitably quiet,just as your last years were hushed;

and the evening coloured with old stories.I recall the grimness of their first telling,the happening of some of them, how painwas tempered and flashed off as wit;and the buoyancy of those expressions,how I later heard them in my headas a bubble expanding, rising –a stent for the spirit, a child’s joyin suddenly finding himself wise.

You showed us there were different kindsof debt, unlisted, uncontracted.Their being discovered is their being paid off.And whether on time or late, who knows?

Which brings us back to now, truth and sentiment.And this: you always knew better than to call itfalling asleep. And now that you’re gone,irrevocably, what words I have from youare gripped in the memory: an old treestill clutching a knuckle of leaves.

BOOM

Under a wall of trees, the far endof the lake is gleaming. This is howI remember it, a foil no silverever outshone.

But the near bankis gouged; bitten away, that slopeto where water gently foamed,its bob of broken reeds,fat and brown as cigars.

Where are they now, those older boys,those girls, the air livewith their sophisticated laughter,their limbs red and glistening?

Vanished like the smellof suncream, or the shiver on hearinga song on a new transistor.

A car on the road boom booms,faint but insistent.

THE OTHER HALL

The other hall was never cold, cool sometimes in summer,the air that of another city, migrating wholewith its sounds like swallows, its corridors and stairs.But here, ground level leads to high light, a lakeside,trees littering autumn, colours piled and woven.

It could have been a dream, that child kicking up dreams;you, caught on the long shore of your future,wide-eyed and self-possessed,before you slipped off, following desires like leaves,into a place where the sun shone intermittently;and coming out, as now, your face lined not with painbut disappointment, and that lightly, as if it were your due;

and dogged by an echo of a disapproving voice;your mother’s now, your own at seventeen?

LAWN

With that fear I sometimes haveon taking up a pen, I drove in searchof unmarked bridges, glintsof moving grey that might have beena backwater; a gap still used, grass flattened,bushes fused together in an arch.

And there were roads I couldn’t go,tracks that opened onceinto a promise of wholenesswhere a sun almost setbefore it was time to turn awayand into years of wandering half-sightlesswhile paths greened over and signposts rusted.

Tractors rolled in fields which stretchedlong and bright like stripsof bandages. For the first time overwhelming,this sense of high summer, of travellingthrough your own mistake.I kept the windows up. I didn’t stop.

I pulled in at an old hotel.I’d never felt at home here. Now,my coffee scalding, black, I listenedto a wedding party on the stepsand looked out at the lawn,a lone man on a wrought-iron chair,not quite my age, further from home,struggling as the world he saw supplantedthe one he’d vowed to keep intact.

A BOX OF AIR

Monday, and the sound of the postman,letterboxes clacking along the opposite row,he working his way down, then up.Footsteps, greetings, footsteps; a hurryas the sky presumably grows dark.The blinds are drawn. You waitfor the letterbox to open like that wrongtrain door a man once disappeared through.

Are you still counting? It was numbersfirst overwhelmed you – termites, stars, Hiroshima.Dizzy alike under the sky at nightor pointed at a screen you took refugein a box of air, calmedby the purity of blank walls,windows breathing through a hairline crack.

And are your dreams more beautifulfor being the hive your active mind denies?for to be sure there is a seaside paththat will never leave you, walls overhungwith flowers; you in your twenties seeing for the first timethe far end of the bay; a promisemade to yourself.A nightly dream, one of you a ghost.

OUT OF TIME

We are nearer the end of the universethan we are to yesterday.Today was a day out of timea light that should not have shoneand she, washing her handsof her thirty-five yearslooked into the sun and was not blinded.

And when she closed her eyesshe saw on her lids the universesomeone not yet born will paint.Will she be glad to have seenor will this image bean apple never shaken from the tree,shrivelled in the end to a stone?

Look. The leaves that should be deadare reaching out, followingthe sun, like a child’s eyetracing the bright swing of a toyand over the valley where the town should bea mist has settled, veiling the quiet streetsand the tree on a corner where the crows alight.

The air closes round harsh wordslike water round a pebble-drop.The silence is entrancing,and she, remembering, walks to the gate,a step, a year, the musicof gravel under her feetand the drip of suds from her undried hands.

THE SMILE AND THE TUNNEL

As if two wireshad suddenly touchedhe is of us, of the world,its clods and abrasions,

earthed like a small creaturehalf-in, half-out,feeling the air,finding it strange and wonderful

yet not his:the next movementwill be a backing awayinto the smile and the tunnel.

THE HILL

Like water over stones the days pass,only clear in the distance,a river silver in the lowlandsand the sea waiting over the ridge.

There have been a thousand birdssince the first song on the hillall the same, none the sameand the light that lifted them

was as the desert sandrestless, always wishing to be gone.Only the sweet pin of their songpricked a star in the dark

and stung the unsuspecting heartthat carried it home, that cryagainst the sky and eveningand all that had flown on the wind.

AND WHAT IF DEATH

And what if deathwere a figure – any one of manyappearing in the recess of night,whose familiar face or voice crosseswith you when you wake –

enticing you, finally, foreverinto your own dream.

THE SHORTEST DAY BUT ONE

Sun blazed in the rear-view mirrorthe shortest day but oneand Wicklow darkened behind meas I returned to a sense of order,the order of absence:a door that only opened for funeralsfinally closed,

grasses flattened, the rockeryunder its mat of years.And a hallway as Moses’ rock must have been,emptied of water, abandoned,a shell but not a shell.

Two days on. Noon so stillthe sun seems trapped,I turn onto the lane and dwellon the last of my mother’s generationadrift on a sea no one can fathom,a presence seeing but unseen,no more than the sum

of what she taught, the soundof her piano in another’s house.I cross the threshold, and in curtaineddark, something swims acrossthe trick of sight:

is it really me – or a scenetransplanted years later from some film,steam on a platform, dark carriages;I feel in my toes that cold still –waiting for my uncle, the firstChristmas to stay in my mind,and that song

forgotten but for its pulsingthrough me then, the way it slippedout of reach like a bird between branches,and my first knowledge of musicas a place, beyond the next hill.

As so much now, in front, behind;the baby grand in the parlour,its keys like stones, wires lockedin the silence of what they once told,holding nothing, yet waiting to unfoldall music – only to be freed!

I lift the lid and tracelike a silhouette, a scale.Room by room I let what littlelight the year admits,narrow, cold, entire.

CARETAKING

The door creaks,no two ever the samenor the scrape of the key,and each thresholdwith its own storysupine to the crossing shadow.

The dim of an open blindand the shock of being rootedin a place that is nowhere else,not what it was yesterdayor beyond this instant,and miles from anyonea father’s shadow on the wall.

HAY

Unsteady, those glimpses of gold – the sunon the glass of the great house as we movetowards it through the woods. And thenin full view, it seems a thousand moltenwires have meshed to frame the windows.Past orchard, sheepfold and the great rolledmeadow, and beyond, the fresh certainty of hay.

But the sun has gone down on more than oneway of life, and the damp that fogs picturesof shooting parties, will gather in a ball and crushthe promise of restoring fields to what they were.A dream born of reading Tolstoy too lateat night and too long into life: the onlywhispers in hedgerows will be of blood and money.

Our winds are no longer sweet. They carryblight and the mocking truth that they’ve never changed;the mind, like the body, faltering to remember a scentapart from the fact of its once having been,like childhood or one of those songs we can singmore perfectly for its essence having vanished.But you have looked over the steppes, have breathed

air that pains the throat. What was it liketo stand there, at that corner of the yearwhen the mind can see no green, no gold,to hope in spite of all: to see beyondsnow’s bullets to the crisp white of a blanket,the slow, uncertain warmth of a crowded ward,and the spider lines of her newborn breath on glass?

BLOODAnd as we danced, all the stars fell in the sea. – Horslips, ‘Stars’

Stars pepper the skymaking the house more isolated still,describing year by year their endless bleak perfections,mocking the men who gave them shape.Diamonds on cloth, they draw darkness,the eye can’t leave off looking,the head reels with the infirmityof a sudden standing up

for which the only cure is myth,spread across millennia, like stars, like genes:the first of us upright mimicking with their footprintsthat great wheel, bending the bow of a story;and our own child-sight,wondering how they came to be,walking and never losing it,that gauze above the world’s bed.

Indifferent fire rained about Abraham,the violence of a billion clashing stonessoft under his feet. He walked and sawthe stars as a mesh of armies,night’s inky blood, the future:his, out of his grasp.

No longer the gods’ children,those never before uncovered, who leaned outto peer at Galileo and Copernicus,more and yet more,endless as a mass of startled birdsthen pinned, ringed, numbered.

Who believes they danceor fall like jewels in the sea?Some great song, like a bird, was extinguishedwhen ocean and sky were mapped,stories became the act of being told,blood no longer golden, its cells stacked like plates.And yet we dance, hunger for untruth,and nightly are amazeda man has so much blood in him.

SATORI(i.m. John Tackney)

And what remainsafter the light is gone? - the light it leaves behindand at the lasta wise head, a whitewashed wall.

VESPERS

“When the light began to turn greenI knew that night was coming.” - Camus, L’Etranger

The room gives, as they say,onto a square of sky. And in such stillnessas is needed to enticea bird into the hand,the edge of that unmoving bluegives onto all movement,the vastness of what is never caught,the painting that exists beyond the frame.

Noises are gone now. Whatever lifethe street had, is dispersed, taken indoorsand is suddenly felt more keenlyhere where everything is seepingin and out of wallslike food or tiredness ghostingthrough muscle and brain, or colourswashing through the fading mind.

The green of evening is the eye trickinginto truth; dizzy from too long lookingat a fixed point, it cleanses the twilightof its beauty and thousand talesand the night is merely itself,like the tides, nothing more than a motion,a tiny stirring in the universeas a bee shakes before settling to sleep.

Each sound has a purity,muffled, unattached. That dog in the distanceis whole as the stars once wereunder which he barks; the seaunderpinning. Room and skyare one finally, the hour turningwith the unseen certain motionof a drifting boat.

BONE FLUTE

The door opens like a confessional,the light is thatof a London Irish pubwhen the name on the glass warms briefly;

Once I tried to hear its song,then to picture it animate, complete,now I know it longingfor its brother bonesfor the kiss of clay or teethor pining for its spirit scatteredon the lost wind of a sacred rite;a fair day; that first hushwhen glasses are set down.

CHERRIES

The air has the smell of mountain rainit tells of creatures stirring in the undergrowthand for the first time this year it’s mild enoughto leave the doors ajar and walk unhinderedthrough the house. If only thoughtwould give access as freely; room after roomopens onto the shell of itself, its coldmoving past as if shaken by an animalas it stretches in the light.

Still a long time until the sun stretches roundto redden that odd painting of Venice,its walls already pink and orange,their hanging flowers like medals for withstanding winter.A touch of spring and everything quickens - too quick – potted clay still tight,its seal turning over days to crumb.But nothing starts, no tip emerges; all stubbornto their time, as if a knot refused to bud.

We wait still, always; for the momentor the moment to pass, for memoryto be dragged back from extinction, or burstout of nothing like a blossomor blood in water. How longuntil we can rejoice againin the unexpected – like that sudden surgeof water that shocked and delighted methat very first days at the rocks,

my thin legs almost bucklingunder the urge to run, the rest of meheld fast, mesmerised, aware only of wet stone.And afterwards, how many times I dreamedI saw the undertow as a dark sleek animal,frightening but turning away at the last moment,alarmed in turn by the worldinto which I woke, startledevery time by the ceiling’s sheer white.

Is it that memory glows more brightlythe further it has to travel, like a star,or that colour deadens now, the eyeand what it feeds grown tiredfrom a lifetime of reacting? Too many books,perhaps, too little wind. I think of that wiry manI saw once cutting cherries from a height,in his eighties then, mind like a thin tree,heart-tight, layered, moving ever outwards.

A MAP OF THE PARISH OF KILLANNYIN THE 17TH CENTURY

IConsider the light we’ve lostin an age of bulbs;windows ceiling-high, givingonto long tables, inks and dyesrunning in thick glasses,and the meticulous hand, the avid eye.

IIWe come into our ownand as soon leave it.Consider too, those trees, howthe paper took to colour,becoming what it held,brown and green,

the page that was tree once,its sap that was rain and earthparched and brittle now,an opaque mirror. History.The living reading the dead.

And carrying on a ritualenacted before birth. For what are wewithout this consciousnessof our not existing: as this paperis a present dead three hundred years;

as we impose order on a life -or part thereof – no longer there:an animal turning three timesround last night’s bedding;or rubbing an old woundto assure its having healed.

IIIOn quiet days the mapas I remember it is a conceit.Nothing drawn is ever true, paper admitsbrush-tip or nib as clay the zig-zagof running rain. And so the fluidityof ideas ploughs a path and sticksto it. That house, strong-walled,floating in a corner, has no peculiarity,it rises like a drawing in a child’s bookfrom a vast imagined grassland.

An age passes with every re-draftingRecollections become languages,inimical, taking chunks from each otheror at their purest, passing through,colliding and splitting off,altered, true to themselveslike the birth of planets.

This picturing – a vivid flash –of children in a roll call:is it the illumination before a long lapseor the last white heat of a filament burning out?

It may be time to look in boxes under boxes,to kneel and search until the lower limbsare dizzy with pins and needles.

EVENING

A restless sky, a hurrying on the pierbefore the squall. Sundays to come take shape:a grey that drops like mercury, and thenthe niggling hope that dawn might make a difference.Evening and its clear sky brings a senseof being between two endings, and the fearof going from I to we and back again.

STOCK

After the film crew have packed up and gonethe squashed churchyard turf slowly loosensand fills out. Grass under mere sunlightshines and dulls at the whim of the sky,pining for the hiss of the arc lamps;lush in their heat once, it shrinks into clumpshaving worn out its green in the cause of beautyshut away, a roll of stock moulding on an attic floorand only word of tired mouth to keepfirm in the mind that real, pollen-heavy heat.Stone, plot, frame. Everything hppens in boxes,love even, whether epic or lockedwhere no one can twist it out of shape,true as one of those carved names - only the whipof countless winters on the moorscan wear it to a riddle for fingertips.

THE LOST CHILD

And after thirty-seven years, I pauseon this first work-free morningand remember thosewho have gone too soon; by their own handor driven down in a locking of wheelsand the dull smack of earth on steel;

for whom the present is a maskfashioned by those they left,a favourite song become a bitter thing;

who grow old in the childrenthey never had, in the fadingof those who remain. Yetfor me, in the endthey are forever at a desk,their faces childlike, questioning.

II Landmarks

THE PATH

Where does it begin, this threadinginto a place of strangers,a wood about to close?

Dark hours in a cell of little learning,crows on the wind scattering like leavesas they did twenty years ago:

their sameness, their unrelenting drudgery,makes them eternal,like grey clouds, like snow.

Days in the sun are lost,unique as loved onesor those few dreams that persist.

and memories of placesseen once, twice, or not at all.Viaticum, journey-food.

So too, this peculiar, sudden haunting.

WALNUT

Walking a dirt path, dry and rollered –even the countryside was level, streamsa grid of tributaries – we came acrossa walnut tree. I think backto its spread, its shade, and howtwo thousand years before, an armyof trees swept down from the Juras,their tops, plumes in a wind

but all I truly remember

is a green shell, soft as a fontanelle,its undulations like a brainunder my wondering finger.

THE PRUDENCE OF BIRDS

See from a safe distance meltwaterchurning grey, chilling summer air,hear the sudden dearth of birdsong.Call it, as you would, the neutral simplicityof ice, heat, bitten earth, acting on each other.Our truths are gritswept in a great turbulence,light and shade, beautiful, brief;

and I incline to the old beliefin the prudence of birds, their patience outlastingthe giant’s cold breath, his angry silver.The glacier bleeds, settles; then comessong, timid at first, late-leafing treesoverhanging like horses’ heads.

In all my dreams I neverfell here, where most of all I should,have woken instead with a sense of cleannessand having seen the birthplace of the psyche,the war between movement and stillness.

ROSENGARTEN, BERN

Roses, bones. And below,the old city glisteninglike paint on a mummified finger.

And the bears becoming drabas the earth they padand the sum of their days.

Time on this heightslows to the rhythmof soil, parting, closing;

the married couple posingwith their backs to the middle ageswill become in timetheir own story. Or stories.

The dead, if we think of them,must be content that the livinghave this view at their expensesince beauty, peacecan only be maintainedby a constant hollowing out.

TWANN

The sun will be coming up now on the rows of vinesand later cars will roll up and the immemorial customof the lake will be re-enacted. How longsince the first sacrifice, the boat breaking the water’s calm,the creaking of its oars the only sound?No silence on the shore now. The only troubles are private,put aside; children, sandaled even in October, playa careful distance from spread cloths and charcoal.

But the warmth is making ready to leave, as the swallowshave lately done; if a window catches goldit will be for the shortest time. Yet Twann stands purein a memory of twenty years or more,held in some dim recess: now for an hourit gleams like a cross in a procession.

SOLOTHURN

The bells from the Cathedraltravel on a clear dayas far as the Biel Gatewhich opens onto housesthat could have come from Dillon Street.

The old city curlsround itself like a nest,round the number eleven.The green clock shows no twelve.

And the walls of the Jesuitenkirchelike icing – that first cake,its ribbon a red sash.Outside the sun dazzles,

the Aare rubs old against new;bridges, too many crossings,a restlessness no history calms,nor beauty, solid yetnot belonging, like eleven.

THOSE FAR-OFF PEAKS

Like the unattainable white of clouds, those far-off peaksJungfrau, Eiger, Monch,a purity only distance can confer,a newly-baptised soul, or music

flawless on first hearing.No melt-water disgorges its gritthe way time vomits its truth;snow, sun and sky in the fleetingbalance of a child’s first step.

And as the blood runs ever, infinitesimally,colder; as the eye withdraws from lightlike the erosion of a hill,there is still the sudden surprise of harmonyand one more time, the mirage of perfection.

LANDMARKS

I

There is first a calm, yet a sense tooof the glacier only lately having moved,of being somehow at lake’s edgeinstead of the edge of wood and mountain.Lovely, yes; green, pastoral, the very frailtyof wooden churches strongerthan an act of faith. A calm of havingstepped forever out of the primeval,looking across and downinto the richness of tilth and history.

How this land yields up its stories!One by one, like the dreams of a childleaving him until there remainsno more than a handful, worn, distorted,one grown like the fact of a shadow –

a two-roomed school, grim as the wirethat sets it apart; it admits no light,neither through glass nor in the mindof one who would lead, ambitionshrivelled to a paper grid –words, more words! A figure sick,frightened, calling for a taper, believing onlyin her image on a wall,grasping the substance of delusion,young minds scattering like micefrom corner to corner of a box

And the church it faces: barn-shaped,it gathers in what little harvestencroaching age provides.

Nowhere here is far from Jung’s countryand the breadth of green is the measureof snow-skies past and to come.

II

Skirting the woods, the paths move in and out of shadowand no view is true to memory,even the signposts are a suggestion – somethingmay have happened here, an intake of breath,a line of pollen along the bodyand a longing then – for, sure, now –for the unconsciousness of trees, stock-still,their leaf and spread outliving names,the change of language swirling about them like the windor the noise of far-off battle:

to be a cell in that great animal, the forest,and not an ant crawling through the maze of our absences.An hour’s trek to a well that isn’t here,on no map now. You feel againunder your outstretched hand, cool airrising from its depths – but where?and you fight with the certainty that it wasn’ta dream last time, and envy the wide-winged birdcircling its distant field. The Roman Well:

always some word will trigger a search,pick at a scab of loss deep in the psychewhere no art can truly heal; years alonemay soothe it to a pilgrim’s itch, storied, timeless,and never wholly futile.The rows of corn, so improbably greenin the baked clay, seem to converge on a pointhidden in a dip. What chance has the mind,torn between wilderness and order –and the sky’s relentless, level blue?

III

The air is full of its own strangeness, loadedwith the power to startle – like that ringingof a bell across a meadow where there is no bell,where the small yellow flowers have no secretstretching as they do as far as the neatness of a long road.Midday, so bright the eyelids fill with a red-gold darknessand it seems that this breadth, green, yellow, blue, is its own closed room,and that sound in the air is a knocking on the wallto be let in or out: or a summoning,for the snake to slough back into its cast-off skinand trees to spear their way through the miles of fieldslike soldiers, like fathers. Three thousand yearsof clearances are a holding at bay; those scatteredhouses are small boats ready at any moment to sink.The grasses, fattened on water, rustle nonethelesslike paper. The sun passing from shadow to shadowis taking all to itself. Only the forest is spared,deep-rooted, grown beyond the gift of light.

IV

The stream is a trickle in summer,last year’s flotsam beginning to bleach,branches becoming bones.Flowers like pale blue starsare forming among the shingleand a lizard warms its belly on another stone.

A step across and into the flat hectareswhere drainage keeps the groundas it should be, and cars, hidden,are a steady hum.

Over the meadow missionaries rest.What would they make of thisenormous neatness: no bears, no wolves,an element of held breath in our coming and going?Dizzy on stomach-churning waters,navigating by breaks in the cloudand then by mosses and the call of birdstheir clearances were an act of acceptance,that they worked, ate and healedat the sufferance of the wilderness:that there was no holding together,only a holding back, a plantingbetween one harvest and another,a prayer between peace and tumult.

Against great pagan fires they pitted their damp bones,against dawn they tested the entranced mind,the body in the cell of its own cold.Some slept in stone; others the bears hador roots claimed, their tendrils like a child’s fingersand round their traces boxes grew,walls, fences, advance and retreat.But how triangulate the mind?Only in the clearing haze of chaoswhen truth settles like a chill, and fieldsyield sustenance and unexpected bones.

V

Bones in the dry bed of dreams,pinned to a page, sucked dry of lifeas air sucks the curve of inkand no letter illuminated, the roomsilent but for the clock chantingthe running down of its own wheelsAnd the pennants outside, still, breathless,

the train a gliding, yellow dot, Its carriagesa pencil-line drawn along foothills.White is the only colour; the knight,the scholar, fade into it as memorybleeds into the necessities of day.Down the corridor, mobile phonesare held like scapulars before an altar,

they range along windows like birdsgreedy for flies; the snapped to be buriedin piles, world wide: rubble without matter,the triumph of the immaterial world.But is it any different from the firingof a monk’s imagination, his desirefor an unearthly city on a hill?

VI

Evening and an empty platform. The sunis a haze on the tips of the hills,the hills themselves like a blanketready to be unrolled. And distant, a lake, bottlenecked,feeding a river, funnelling last winter’s snowtoward the ocean. The last pleasure-steamerhas put in, and that urban sound, quieter than silence,a settling, a hundred thousand sighs,falls like a landing of dust.And more than silence, the emptinessof waiting for a train, the knowledge of being a doton that unending rectangle, the railway cutting,that time itself is invalid, will only resumewith the first sound, faint, almost beyond hearing,of an approaching engine. Others come out,shrouded now; their speech, low, unintelligible,is all of the setting off, a hope that nothinghas been left undone. One pair of soft hands fluttertoo soon, too soon! Too late, and like a bird,they settle. Then the light, always stronger than daylight,that is power an inevitability, glidesover the heat of the tracks. The enginecomes into shape behind it. When the doorsslide open, all this will be over; againno more than names. But since the namesthemselves – stations, churches, wells – were givenin turn to a story, when did it al start, this dashalong a strip of light between two shades?

And yet not done; moving backwards, acrossa cleft in the hills, the sun’s rima mere gold wire now, picks like a lighthouse beaman abandoned shepherd’s hut, squalid, ramshackle,suspended in a clearing. Its fall will be gentle,its stones will tell no hurt.

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.